Half a billion years ago, a collision of continents and gradual volcanic activity formed islands of pink granite jutting above the North Atlantic. Slowly, lichen and moss grew and died atop the granite crystals structures, churning out a thin layer of topsoil. As everywhere, the slow accumulation of organic matter eventually created the right conditions for more complex plant life to take root. Now, spruce is supreme on the fog-drenched island coasts. A tough sub-alpine forest of stunted krummholz trees and hardy underbrush flourishes in the shallow acidic soil spread atop the granite, stringy moss fed from the Atlantic fog growing long from the spruce branches.
The islands feel shrouded from the North American continent, protected by the frigid currents from highways, superstores, megachurches, strip malls, oil refineries, diesel-powered rail lines, flood lights, traffic, Memorial Day sales, high school football games, jets, 4th of July parades, parking fees, luxury apartment construction, mass shootings, advertisements, and psychopathic, scum-of-the-Earth cops . The small ferry to the island only runs a few times a day in the summer, and even less in the off season. Some on the island get by for weeks and months without visiting the mainland, relying on the kitchen gardens, fishing, and the small general store. It’s simply too expensive for private capital to see the island as a profitable consumer market, so it spares the region to remain a rare vestige of a pre-war New England community.
This freedom from modern North American consumer culture is what draws many. They live in humble lean-tos, a-frames, old fisherman’s cottages, converted wood sheds, yurts, and barns. They hike through the sub-alpine forest, carrying in water from town in plastic jugs, to reach their humble wooden homes. Don’t let such ruggedness fool you- most of those islanders hold PhDs and work as engineers, doctors, lawyers, architects, and professors online or back on the mainland. They gather under the spruce trees for Turkish coffee and discuss political economy. They grow tomatoes and blackberries in the sandy soil, shared freely between them through an economy of abundance. During the workweek, the retired islanders babysit the kids of the younger islanders, taking them on hikes through the forest and adventures to the rocky beaches. The parents pay them back through shared dinners, shellfish, or nothing at all. Everything feels like a gift, with summer days on the islands blending into each other in a crunchy utopian blur.
At first glance, the islands are obviously an enclave of wealth, of the academic bourgeois escaping the American continent for a few months a year and living out their rustic communalist fantasy. Admittedly, this is true. But the islanders are not capitalists in the sense that they are not the landlords, managers, and CEOs of society; they don’t control the means of production, or much capital for that matter. Despite their wealth, they are a peak into what could be, of a post-capitalist future where automation has freed the worker to pursue education, pleasure, and community, not consumption, to the fullest.
Too many North American leftists subconsciously attribute Marxism to grandiose displays of industry. Communism in North America should not attempt to replicate the industrial ethos of post-war Eastern Europe for a simple reason: North America has already industrialized, and arguably industrialized too far. What little industrial propaganda we promote should be focused on building zero-carbon energy production and transportation infrastructure. The youth forgets that communism is more than just economics. Far beyond the technicalities of a centrally planned economy, the experience of North American communism to a single person will feel like the backyard concerts on the mossy granite islands of northern Maine. It will be block-parties, neighborhood potlucks, folk festivals in general stores, youth hikes in the Rocky Mountains, fall harvest celebrations, New Year’s parades, co-op coffee shops, breakfast, birthday parties, and camping. The promise of restructuring social dynamics, of creating non-hierarchical communities more aligned with the pre-industrial villages and tribes that we have evolved to be a part of, is perhaps the most convincing argument for communism we can make to our pleasure-driven culture.